Snapchat Acquires “Placed” to Enhance Its Location Advertising

Snapchat is Upping its Ads Game Once Again…

Snapchat just acquired Placed, a startup focused on tracking and measuring consumers’ locations on their smartphones, and using that information to serve up more targeted mobile ads.

Snapchat released its “Snap to Store” ad product a few months ago. That product allows advertisers to track online to offline sales. But with the acquisition of Placed, Snapchat appears to be putting more of an effort on taking the local ad dollars.

As Mashable explains, Placed offers analysis on other third-party platforms like Facebook and Instagram and websites, so that an advertiser or a publisher can compare the outcome of each of them. Placed also reportedly measures billions of locations.

Snap makes the majority of its revenue from mobile advertising (just as Facebook, Google, and Twitter do). With the addition of Placed, Snapchat is looking to become a bigger player in that space. The location tracking is all opt-in. Snap also will put in place data-sharing, privacy, and security guidelines so that advertising data is not shared between Snap’s own services like “Snap to Store” and the company Placed.